Midnight Yoga

Last Friday, Kevin and I decided to try something a bit new. We went to a two hour yoga class at “Laughing Lotus” in the Mission district from 10 PM – midnight. Normally, I am getting into my pajamas by 10 and asleep by midnight, but, we thought we’d see what this scene was like. The teacher was someone that I had taken before at our gym. I liked her. She wasn’t my favorite instructor, but, I definitely learned a couple of new techniques from her.

The class had about 20 people and was pretty interesting. It was a beautiful, dark space with a live band playing during our yoga. There was a little more singing then usual, but, I sort of enjoyed this on a Friday night. On a normal weeknight, I’d probably prefer to skip the singing to save time. But, here, I enjoyed it. Most of the yoga was pretty standard. We did do a “Bird of Paradise” move that I had heard about, but, never tried, so, that was fun. Here is a demonstration of the Bird of Paradise:

I couldn’t pull this off with a straight leg, but, at least I was able to get my leg up in the air along with the arm bind.

We also practiced some poses like Firefly and handstands which Kevin enjoyed. He’s really into the strength moves/arm balances which I’m usually not good at. But, he seems to be able to do them after a few tries.

By the end of the two hours, the time seemed to fly by, which was a nice feeling. We felt great afterwards and has some tea and animal crackers along with the other yogis.

On Saturday morning at 9 AM, we ended up going to another yoga class, “Forest Yoga”, at Aha Yoga, a studio that Kevin went to the previous week. This class was really great. It was challenging, hot and sweaty, but, the flow of it was really good.

Yes… two yoga classes with 9 hours. That’s what happens when Kevin gets obsessed with something… But, I’m thinking being obsessed with fitness is a good thing. Other obsessions could be a lot worse.

Many Milestones – weddings, babies, houses and graduations!

I’ve been absent from my personal blog for quite a while now. I think its because I’ve been doing a lot of work related activities (including my first speaking engagements … woo hoo!) as well as keeping up with all of our friends’ milestones. Here are just a few things we helped people celebrate:

1. Our friends Josh and Libby got married in May, so, we attended the rehearsal dinner and wedding in Cupertino!

2. Kevin and I celebrated our three year wedding anniversary! We dined at Absinthe in SF and had a grand time sipping their cocktails and munching on some of the best fries in the city.  We both agree that anniversaries should be celebrated in a more festive way than birthdays. You’ll have a birthday no matter what…but, you have to really work for the the anniversaries

3. Our friends Ellis and Barbara had a baby girl, Zara! Yay! We visited them last weekend and hopefully brought over a small bit of relief for the tired parents.

4. Our friend Amy got her PsyD after five years in graduate school! We went to dinner with a couple of her friends and her parents last night at Le Colonial. To think that we knew her when she was still wondering what she was going to do with her life…. now, five years of grad school are done! Unfortunately, we’ve lost her to NY.

5.  We started looking for a house again. Ok, you never know how serious we are about buying since we always seem to be looking for a house. But, we have several friends who have bought recently and the lower mortgage rates seemed to have us thinking again…

Here are a couple of the houses that we really liked from this weekend. Unfortunately, we didn’t think either of them were a good enough deal to make us take a plunge. They were quite lovely though.

239 Duncan St.

60 Buena Vista Place

I think life is finally slowing down a little bit. My work is less hectic and we are off on a vacation to Alaska in a couple of weeks!

Speaking at Flex 360 in Indianapolis

May is one busy, busy month. I don’t write on my personal blog about work very much because… hey…. I have a work blog too. But, work seems to be the main driving force in May. We are running on empty at work preparing for a public Beta that is coming up in June. Plus, in the next 20 mins I’m leaving for the airport to head to Indianapolis for a Flex conference where I’m doing my first big presentation. Ahhh! Luckily, I’m not doing it alone. I’ll be doing a presentation on Custom Itemrenderers (very, very exciting) with my co-worker Ryan. We are getting in late Sat. night so that we are available on Sunday for a full day event called a “Bugquash” where customers will come join us at the Crown Plaza in Indy to fix bugs in our product. It will be a long day from 10 AM – 7 PM. Then, the conference starts on Monday…. that is when our presentation is. I’ve also signed up to do a quick 15 min. talk at Flash Camp on May 29. Unfortunately, I got stuck doing the last presentation at 9:30 PM. With free beer at this Friday night event, I’m not sure who will be coherent enough to pay attention to my preso! Oh well… its less pressure, I suppose.

Last weekend, we were in Chicago for a wedding, next weekend is another wedding here in the bay area… May is just going to fly by!!  Plus, I turned 32 in all this madness. Alright, I’m off to the airport!

Feeling great…until the soreness sets in

Kevin’s current obsession is working out. For the past two months, he’s been trying yoga classes and various ultimate conditioning classes. He actually belongs to three gyms, at the moment. That’s right… THREE. He belongs to the Apple gym, Crunch gym (that I belong to) and 24 HR fitness which he hasn’t been to in years, but, has not been able to give up a $50/year membership.

This morning, we got up around 6:00 AM for a 7:00 AM ultimate conditioning class. I was really scared about this class, actually. Kevin went to it last week and said it was the hardest class that he’s taken. But, he was still going back because the teacher was awesome. So, this week, I sucked it up and decided to try the class. I was surprisingly resilient through the class. Taz, the instructor even gave me a compliment once.   Don’t get me wrong, I was dying when we were doing push-ups on the bosu ball and going through a series of burpies¹. But, I really did feel great after the class. Taz played 90’s hip-hop and made tons of jokes. For 7:00 AM on a Monday morning, you have to be pretty great to get a room of 16 people smiling while they are working their abdominal muscles. Taz did it! I’ll be back next Monday.

¹ burpie: To experience a burpie,start off with feet together in a wide bent over hands on the ground position, kick your legs back behind you,(so it looks like you are going to do a push up), being them back forward to your starting position, then stand up, jump and reach for the sky. Repeat

Walking in other people’s sweat

A week ago, Kevin and I took a 2 hour beginner’s yoga workshop with Janet Stone at Yoga Tree. This teacher apparently has quite the following. She has DVDs, retreats, t-shirts and teaches others how to be yoga teachers. Our class had only about 15 people (probably because it was such a beautiful day outside). This was a nice size because she was able to provide instructions and give feedback on our poses.

On Friday, we decided to go to one of her classes for all levels. We met another friend there for the 6:15 PM Friday class. I figured that a Friday couldn’t be that crowded. People would much rather be at happy hour on a Friday… not yoga, right? Boy was I wrong, this class had about 100+ people. We have this number because there were at least 10 people per row and about 10 rows. The yoga mats layed out were no more than 5-6 inches apart from each other. This was quite the scene. There were some highly experienced yogis doing all sorts of crazy moves like hand stands, heads stands that jumped to back bends, and a lot of people seemed to be meeting other friends there.  The class started with some VERY loud “Om” chants and moved on through a series of flow yoga. I didn’t actually find the practice to be too physically challenging, however, the room was so hot that everyone was sweating so much and it was hard to breathe at times. On certain poses, you were also on your neighbors mat or staring straight at their butt from behind. At least once, we smelled someone with gas added to the smell of body odor and sweat…. The practice ended with a chant sang by the teacher. Her voice was amazing, actually. But, what was more amazing was that she had the crowd join her in a three part harmony of a chant. This was very impressive. I thought it sounded great.

Once the class was over about 1.5 hours later, I was pretty glad to get out of the room. I was walking around the room bare foot and noticed that I kept walking in pools of other people’s sweat…. ugh. It was pretty gross, but, I’m actually still glad that I went for the unique experience. Kevin also realized why most men in the class had gone shirt-less. His shirt looked like he’d just come in from some pouring rain. This was a different world from my typical gym yoga practice which I returned to today.

Positive News Stories

Most of the news is filled with tragedy, bad economic news or the newest ponze scheme, but, today, I heard two very news stories that really made me smile.

#1 President Obama signed into law the bill that I wrote about in an earlier post called the “Serve America Act”. The bill will fund Americorps, tripling its size over the next eight years. The bill also provides ways for senior citizens and high school students to give back to their community for very small education grants.

I actually can’t believe that there were so many people in Congress (mostly, if not all, Republicans) who voted against this bill. The bill is perfect for our bad economic times. It gives opportunities to new college graduates who are looking at a very dismal job market. Plus, it will give us cheap labor all across America! The amount of money spent for the work that these volunteers do is equivalent to paying someone less than minimum wage… for often very skilled jobs.

There is still one bill waiting for Congress’s approval. This is the “Incentive to Serve Tax Act” giving companies tax breaks for allowing employees to volunteer their time. I could personally be affected by this one, so, I REALLY hope it passes. If it does, I’m going to try and push Adobe to give us some “Volunteer Days” as an official benefit.

#2 The second piece of news that I enjoyed today was the clip from last Sunday’s Miss America pageant. Apparently, Miss California was asked by judge Perez Hilton how she felt about gay marriage. She stumbled on her answer eventually saying that she believed marriage should be between a man and a woman. The b*tch lost and a lot of people think it is because of the way she answered that question. If someone actually lost Miss America because they came out against gay marriage, then, we’ve come a long way in America. And…this makes me proud!

In case any of you missed it, here is the video:

TaxCut Torture

Earlier this year, Kevin had the brilliant idea that we should do our taxes twice. One time with Turbo Tax and one time with TaxCut. He thought that somehow, there might be a subtle difference and we could save ourself some money. I agreed that this idea could potentially reap some benefits.  So, we both embarced on the fun journey of doing taxes over the course of the past few weeks. Unfortunately, Kevin claimed his right to TurboTax while I was stuck with TaxCut. I used TaxCut a while back, but, after one year, I moved back to TurboTax (probably for good reason). TaxCut made enterring dividends, stock sales and options so difficult!

So, last Wednesday, we both finished our set of taxes and printed them out to compare. Mine was a savings of about $200. As we started to go line by line through the 1040, we pretty much only matched up on the first income line. After that, it was all different. Ah! What a nightmare. We spent a few hours going over… well… is this a short term capital gain? I thought options were a long term capital gain? I realized that many of my numbers were wrong because TaxCut had not guided me through the questions like “Is this an employee stock purchase? Is this employee options? etc. Plus, I had a typo where I said a loss was $180000 instead of $18000. Oops. So, in short, we scrapped my set of taxes and went with Kevin’s Turbo Tax. Next year, we might use a tax guy.

My attempts at flying

After some pushing from Kevin, I decided to try a “yoga wings” class at my gym. Its practically a circus act where everyone has their own long flowy white sheet that they toss and turn upside down in. Here’s a sample photo:

There were about 13 people in this class (11 women, 2 men and the two female instructors). You were constantly wrapping your arms or legs around this white sheet while it held you up in various poses including a lot of inversions (like the one to the right). I had a really hard time jumping up onto the cloth at times. I like to blame the fact that I’m vertically challenged and maybe it was set at the wrong  height for me, but, really… I think I was just chicken. I didn’t do half of the inversions that nearly everyone in the class was doing. They all made it look like we were in the circus and I was a clown. Oh well. Eventually, I did do one of these little moves shown in the photo, but, I never got to any of the more complicated stuff.

I’d like to say I will stick with it until I’m tossing and turning like a circus show, but, I doubt it. I’ll stick to my traditional yoga routine.

Our 7×7 tour of San Francisco Food

Recently, 7×7 magazine published a list of “The Big Eat SF, 100 Things to Eat & Drink before you die“. Kevin and I looked at the list and while we have hit a good number of the restaurants and bars on the list, we hadn’t had exactly what this list. Kevin refuses to allow us to check things off of this list unless we have had exactly what is written on it. For example, #88 Buckwheat crepe and a French Cider at Ti Cous. We have been to Ti Cous several times and all of their savory crepes are buckwheat. They are quite good, but, this isn’t one of our favorite restaurants to frequent. However, we have never had a french cider there. So, Kevin would not let us check this off of the list until we had the french cider. He also won’t let us check something off the list if we both haven’t tried it. Case in point, #10 Baja-style fish tacos at Nick’s Crispy Tacos. I have had these on a number of occasions, but, Kevin had not. So…again, we didn’t cross #10 off of the list.  The only items that we crossed off the list at our first viewing of it were:

#4 Spicy crab and grits at Front Porch – This is actually the only spectacular thing at Front Porch…but, its reason enough to go back.

#17 Tea Leaf Salad at Burma Superstar – I am a big fan of this salad, but, unfortunately, the line is so long at this restaurant that we hardly go.

#22 Vietnamese Roasted Pork Sandwich at Saigon Sandwich – I have bought these for Kevin on numerous occasions while I get a tofu sandwich. The sandwich is $3 and one of my favorite meals in the city.

#25 Loaf of bread straight out of the oven from Tartine. (mmmm… only had this once)

#33 Prime rib at House of Prime Rib (Kevin checked this off, I will never have it)

#35 Salted Caramel Ice cream at Bi-Rite Creamery. (not my favorite flavor, but, this is our favorite ice cream place….we take all visitors there)

#40 Cheeseburger at Taylor’s Automatic Refreshers (another one Kevin has had and I won’t ever have)

#46. Chips and Salsa from Papalote (our favorite Mexican place in SF)

#83 Sweet Potato Fries with banana catsup at Poleng Lounge (I was so excited this made the list, I didn’t know people loved them as much as me… banana catsup is authentic Filipino)

#97 Sesame Balls at Yank Sing

#100 Cheese course at Gary Danko (Fantastic!)

Since we got the list, we’ve been trying to hit a few of the places every weekend. It has made our decision making for where to eat a lot easier. We just ask each other… well, what’s on the list? Almost everything that we’ve had on the list has been really phenominal, actually.

#5 Chasu ramen at Katanaya (we had this for dinner tonight, it was the best ramen I’ve had in a long time. Good ramen is hard to find outside of Japan)

#8 Morning Bun at Tartine (we waited 20 mins. in line to get a morning bun and then Tartine was too crowded … as usual, to sit. We ate the buns in our car. They were absolutely delicious. But, this is not worth the wait).

#10 Baja-style fish tacos at Nick’s Crispy Tacos – Kevin has now had these after I’d been eating them for years.

#21 Pizza Margherita at Pizzeria Delfina (Great!!! Their roasted fennel salad with arugula is amazing, as well)

#49 Ginger snaps at Miette (bought these today…they are sweet, rich and yummy. I personally think the cupcakes at Miette are dry and overrated thought)

#55 Milk-roasted pork at L’Osteria Del Forno – Kevin had this two weeks ago and loved it. This is one of the North Beach restaurants that we’ve been going to for years, but, we have never ordered the pork.

#68 Irish Coffee at the Buena Vista – This seems like a very touristy thing to do, but, it was fun. There is a great view of Aquatic Park from the Buena Vista windows.

#80 Apple Fritter at Bob’s Donut – I thought Bob’s was overrated in the past, but, now I know why people love it. The apple fritter was so good!

#88 Buckwheat crepe with French cider at Ti Cous – This was the one thing on the list that we didn’t like. The cider was cold in a small ceramic cup….it just tasted weird.

That is all for now! We are 20% through the list and look forward to many new things in the future.

Newspaper articles become real people

Like most Sunday mornings, I scanned the San Francisco Chronicle while having my morning coffee. On the front page was a story of three cops getting killed in Oakland after a routine traffic stop. I thought this was sad, but, I didn’t continue reading because I honestly don’t like to read really tragic stories.

Later in the day, at Grace Cathedral service, the congregation prayed for the fallen police officers. I said a prayer for them too.

In the afternoon, my sister called me to tell me that one of the police officers killed was a friend of hers from college. He had a wife and a baby. I remembered his name from her many stories of college over a decade ago, now. Suddenly, this story with more death statics in Oakland had a new dimension. I felt so sad…not only for the officers who died and their families, but, for every police officers who are often hate in crime ridden areas of cities like Oakland. So, to all the police officers serving us every day, I say thank you.

Here is a nice article about this here: sfgate article.